Andres Orozco's Precis

Precis

Andres Orozco

English 12

1/24/13

Taylor, Mark Lloyd. "Ishmael's (M)Other: Gender, Jesus, And God In Melville's Moby-Dick." Journal Of Religion 72.3 (1992): 325. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Jan. 2013.

PRECIS: MOBY DCIK

In “Ishmael’s (m)Other; Gender, Jesus, and God in Melville’s Moby-Dick” literary critic Mark Taylor argues the contrast between God’s masculine power and the feminine  negativity of Jesus Christ. Taylor demonstrates many different forms God takes in Moby Dick. He also highlights and explains the gender differences shown in the novel. Mark Taylor is showing the relationship between God and Jesus, as well as, masculinity and feminism in order to show the theological views of how everything and everyone is connected. 

Taylor demonstrates how Melville incorporated religion into his novel. For starters Moby Dick is full of Biblical names such as Ishmael, Ahab, Elijah, Gabriel, and Jeroboam. Melville also wrote about the two fish stories such as Jonah’s whale and Leviathan God. These stories set a tone to Moby Dick which is the powerful presence of God that judges and punishes human pretension and rebellion. Taylor claims that Moby Dick is somewhat a representation of the almighty God due to its spiritual white color and the characteristics of ubiquity and immortality. Taylor says Moby Dick is an image of God because Ishmael recognizes it too and uses theological language to describe the mighty beast. Ishmael employs the image of crucifixion to describe Ahab’s death, which relates back to Jesus Christ, the son of God. Taylor suggests Jesus’ teachings are in Moby Dick due to the fact that the Golden Rule (“to do my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me”) is seen three time in the novel. Jesus’ teachings are the same in all three stories because they all show Jesus’ love, which is seen as feminist. Jesus is seen feminist because anything that shows love is seen as un-masculine. 

Taylor’s close reading and argument about the gender difference in Moby Dick goes beyond being a man or a women. Taylor’s careful reading of the book shows how only two women in the novel get actual quotes. All the other women that are talked about happen to live on land. This is where Taylor’s argument gets a little more complex and explains how masculinity and feminism can be shown in different forms just like God can. All the women ever talked about in the book live on land. Ishmael does a portrayal of gender difference in the chapter “The Tail.” In this chapter Ishmael made the basic contrast between the feminine domesticity of the green land and the masculine adventurousness of the blue sea. the feminine land is seen as safe while the masculine sea is dangerous. as Taylor put it land represents “safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends all that’s kind to our mortalities” which makes land our mother, a woman.The different behavior of male and female is also shown in the novel when it is explained that when a male whale is harpooned all his friends abandon him but if a female whale is harpooned the whales stay behind and swim around her for concern. This highlights how their gender effects the way they react and how femininity shows love and masculinity shows loneliness. Tyler comes to a conclusion of of how masculine independence and feminine domesticity require each other and work together like the land and the sea.

Moby Dick has become a classic American novel. It has become a part of American history because showing the differences in gender in the novel, as Taylor did, shows American history of the oppression of women. Women were seen weak and incapable of doing a mans job. The term “God bless America” and at the back of a dollar bill “In God We Trust” proves to people how Americans are religious and God is in everything for us. Just like Taylor pointed out, God was the whale, Moby Dick. God was all around them in those times and God is still around us today. This article expands not only on what it meant to be an American back then, but it shows what it means to be an American to this day.